“Cristóbal Pera, editorial director of Penguin Random House Mexico, said that García Márquez’s family has not yet decided whether to allow the book to come out posthumously, or which publishing house would get the rights.”

A century ago, “a library without books was unthinkable. Now it seems almost inevitable. … What are libraries for, if not storing and circulating books? With their hearts cut out, how can they survive?” All sorts of ways, actually.

“McNerney said the performances were not meant to be an insult or a challenge to lawmakers. They were meant to expose students to accomplished artists. ‘I hope they won’t punish us for presenting a piece of artistic work.’ And, he added, ‘not a cent of state money was used to support this’.”

“For more than half a century, many scholars have believed that Shakespeare consulted a 1580 dictionary published in London called An Alvearie, or Quadruple Dictionarie.” Now a pair of antiquarians claim they’ve found that very volume, complete with Shakespeare’s own handwritten notes. Naturally, some scholars disagree. Robinson Meyer runs down the arguments for and against.

“The indictment reads in places like a forger’s manual, laying out the materials needed to forge masterpieces and how to create a fraudulent history of a painting’s creation, ownership, custody and location, known as its provenance.”

The legendary ice dancers recount how they created the program that won then the gold medal at the 1984 Winter Olympics – and that remains, 30 years later, one of the most storied performances in the history of the discipline. (Surprise: the Ravel piece was considered a radical choice back then.)

Says the man who went from co-scripting Andrei Rublev to making the Oscar-nominated Runaway Train to getting fired from Tango & Cash: “Freedom is not a guarantee of good art. The best art comes in the war or the plague.” “[Art] can help politics when politics are ready to be changed. Not before.” “Opera is much closer to circus than to cinema.” “Tango & Cash, like every real Hollywood film, is a film for people who cannot read.”

“You can see them from at least three highways in Queens, rising up like futuristic beacons: a giant metal circle on top of 16 concrete pillars and three towers stretching skyward, topped by flying saucer roofs. They look like heralds of a new space age. But they were built for the 1964 World’s Fair, as part of the New York State Pavilion.”

“To deepen the sense of intimacy in the Palace Theatre, “Holler’s” creators decided to radically change its seating, spending $200,000 to reposition the ground-level orchestra seats into the kind of stadium seating common in movie theaters.”

“A genre novel is governed by limitations, and the whole of the writer’s skill is directed towards creating the best possible novel within those limitations. A literary novel is governed by nothing – nothing I can think of, not even the requirement to be comprehensible – and the whole of the writer’s skill is directed towards creating the best possible novel.”

“After years of talking about lifelong education, the rhetoric has finally reached reality. Accessing education no longer requires months and years of planning, countless applications, tapping savings or taking out huge loans, and giving up months or years of your life to match some random institutional schedule.”

“Distilling the gentrification problem, a tension exists between the inefficiencies of the labor market and the inefficiencies of the real estate market. The inefficiencies of the real estate market receive all the press. What little attention the inefficiencies of the labor market receive, nobody links it to gentrification.”

“Performance art is a joke. Taken terribly seriously by the art world, it is a litmus test of pretension and intellectual dishonesty. If you are wowed by it, you are either susceptible to pseudo-intellectual guff, or lying.”

“Michael Fentiman can remember the sort of theatre company that would visit his school: ‘Three actors arrive. They turn their baseball caps backwards, do a rap and perform a play about some issues. There’s no set except a CD player.'”